Hillsfar

Game: Hillsfar
Year: 1989
Genre: Mini-games
Setting: Forgotten Realms
Developer: Westwood Studios
Publisher: SSI

It seems like you can hardly venture anywhere on the internet without someone who has stronger opinions about video games than, say, abolishing racism without someone complaining about how the Nintendo Wii is a children’s toy drowning in a sea of creatively bankrupt and soulless mini-games.  I’m not necessarily here to debate that (Although video games are essentially children’s toys and we should all just own up to the fact that sometimes that is okay)  but rather to note that this phenomenon is not new or confined to the waggle generation.  But since I have for whatever reason devoted my writing “career” to staying universally positive in regards to everything I write about, I will rephrase this line of thought – Westwood’s Hillsfar is a game that is very much ahead of its time.

Please note that this does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that Hillsfar is a good game.  The game was released after Curse of the Azure Bonds and can ostensibly be played without owning that game, but to do so wouldn’t be missing the point so much as peeling out in your novelty rocket car in the opposite direction of the point, presumably off a cliff and to your death.  You see, Hillsfar is basically an elaborate trainer that allows you to port a character from Pool of Radiance or Curse and subject them to several tedious mini-games, ranging from knife throwing to riding a horse across the worst maintained roads in all of the Forgotten Realms.  Also, lots and lots of breaking and entering, all in the name of adventure.  Your choice of character class determines which guild you work for, which in turn determines what tedious set of mini-games you will play as you wander around Hillsfar and the surrounding area.  The main draw here is that the game gives out boatloads of experience that can be transported into (you guessed it) Curse of the Azure Bonds, making Hillsfar little more than a glorified trainer.  As you can imagine, the lack of both console-based storage and a port of Curse makes the NES port of Hillsfar especially baffling.

 So why did Westwood bother with all the mini-games?  Looking back, that seemed to be a trend in early-90’s computing – taking advantage of the incredible disc space and resolution the PC platform provided by throwing half a dozen or more mini-games at the player to create a more “cinematic” experience.  One doesn’t have to look much further than the handful of universally frustrating “arcade” sections of most Sierra adventure games or pretty much the whole of Cinemaware’s output to see where adding multiple perspectives and modes of gameplay made (at least from a designer’s perspective) a more varied and fully realized game experience.  Not to mention that Hillsfar looks really good.  Despite my distaste for the EGA palette, the game features multiple full-screen tableaus that are incredibly vibrant.

 Unfortunately, the mini-games themselves are a unique combination of dull and completely unintuitive, even with the aid of a manual.  The horse riding required to go anywhere controls well enough, although the bullet hell-levels of debris and arrows are just confusing. Throwing knives is pretty but incredibly dull.  Fighting in the arena is incredibly frustrating and superfluous even by this game’s standard, which is really saying something.  There are more, but the two that are most important are breaking and entering and lockpicking.

You can break into any of the several hundred buildings around Hillsfar anytime you want.  The rewards for doing so are pretty much the same as they are for anything else in this game (that is to say, non-existent and definitely not worth your while) but most missions require you to break into a specific area to find some items or information.  While doing so, guards will immediately find you out and you must bump against any number of random objects or chests to find the exit.  Wait too long and guards will eventually start after you, requiring you to out-maneuver them lest they rub up against you too much and send you straight to the arena mini-game.  Even the most humble thatch hut in the world of Hillsfar hides a labyrinth of teleportation traps and locked treasure chests.  Chances are, your character can just bash the locks on chests anyway, but should you need there is a lockpicking mini-game that can be described as a noble failure.  It seems most modern RPGs include some sort of simulation of the lockpicking process in an attempt to provide added verisimilitude to the virtual thieving experience, but Hillsfar is the first game I am aware of that made it a challenge to the player rather than an algebra problem handled in the background.  Like every other distraction in the game, it’s a tedious and frustrating affair, but it’s still indirectly responsible for the reason you subconsciously flinch when you think about the lockpick breaking sound in a Bethesda game twenty years later.

I’ll confess I didn’t actually complete any of the questlines in Hillsfar (I couldn’t find a cracked copy and using a fake codewheel was easily as frustrating as anything else in the game) but the game deserves some small credit for going out of its way to disguise what it is (a transparent money grab aimed at people who can’t get enough of the Gold Box series) with attempts at innovation.  I cannot fathom a single reason why anyone would want to play Hillsfar this many years after the fact (and can name precious few as to why anyone would want to play it in 1989) but the game at least puts effort into milking the license dry, something that I will come to miss as my time with SSI comes to a close.

 

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Posted by CJ Lowery on December 11, 2011

http://chronodnd.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/hillsfar/